Day 33, & 34 23rd & 24th September Budapest to Zagreb

 Found a nice hotel on the Pest side next to the Danube river which made it easy to get to both sides Buda and Pest to see all the sites, as it was late we asked the guy at reception where was a good place for dinner, with the hassle of all the one way streets it took a while but we finally came to a lovely restaurant and had a yummy dinner and a few drinks before heading back to bed. Next day we started off by going to look at the Hungarian Parliament Building which is the second largest in the world and quite amazing they started building in 1885 and finished in 1902 it has 4 floors, 691 rooms, 10 courtyards and 12.5 miles of stairs to look inside you need to purchase a ticket and as we still had so much to see decided to keep moving. From here we went to Buda Castle which is he historical palace and castle for Hungarian Kings since 1265, with most of the site today being built between 1749 and 1769. We parked the car and took the lift from the street up to the castle complex, we would have liked to have gone into Matthias Church but it was closed for services. Next to the church was Fishermans Bastion which is a beautiful Romanesque terrace with amazing panorama views unfortunately part of it is now a restaurant underneath.  You have to buy a ticket to go up the top to walk across from one side to the other but Pete and Julie had already walked up the other side and Pete decided to move the rope a little  so they could get a good view and take some pictures, this was before we found out that you had to buy a ticket and go up on the other side but it was good for us we got some amazing pics. While in the complex we noticed quite a few cars driving around so when we got back to our car we went and followed a little bus that said castle tours and ended up driving through the whole complex and seeing places we couldn’t get to before. After this we went to view quite a few other buildings and sites before heading for a very very late lunch at Ukranian restaurant which again was delightful. Then it was off to the Shoes on the Danube memorial which is 60 pairs of shoes representing all the Jews who were killed at this spot in WW2 and their bodies dumped into the sea after they had been ordered to remove there shoes as they were valuable and could be resold by the Militia that shot them it was a very moving memorial. From there Pete and Julie decided to walk across the Chain Bridge that was opened in 1849 to connect the two cities Buda and Pest to form Budapest. We thoroughly enjoyed Budapest and would love to come back and spend more time there.
















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